| 31801. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The phenomenology of empathy : a Steinian emotional account
- 2016
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Ingår i: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1568-7759 .- 1572-8676. ; 15:2, s. 227-245
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents a phenomenological account of empathy inspired by the proposal put forward by Edith Stein in her book On the Problem of Empathy, published originally 1917. By way of explicating Stein’s views, the paper aims to present a characterization of empathy that is in some aspects similar to, but yet essentially different from contemporary simulationist theories of empathy. An attempt is made to show that Stein’s proposal articulates the essential ingredients and steps involved in empathy and that her proposal can be made even more comprehensive and elucidating by stressing the emotional aspect of the empathy process. Empathy, according to such a phenomenological proposal, is to be understood as a perceptual-imaginative feeling towards and with the other person’s experiences made possible by affective bodily schemas and being enhanced by a personal concern for her. To experience empathy does not necessarily or only mean to experience the same type of feeling as the target does; it means feeling alongside the feeling of the target in imagining and explicating a rich understanding of the experiences of the very person one is facing.
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| 31802. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The phenomenology of empathy in medicine : an introduction
- 2014
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Ingår i: Medicine, Health care and Philosophy. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1386-7423 .- 1572-8633. ; 17:2, s. 245-248
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article is an introduction to a thematic section on the phenomenology of empathy in medicine, attempting to provide an expose of the field. It also provides introductions to the individual articles of the thematic section.
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| 31803. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The Phenomenology of Falling Ill : An Explication, Critique and Improvement of Sartre’s Theory of Embodiment and Alienation
- 2009
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Ingår i: Human Studies. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0163-8548 .- 1572-851X. ; 32:1, s. 53-66
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper I develop a phenomenology of falling ill by presenting, interpreting and developing the basic model we find in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1956). The three steps identified by Sartre in this process are analysed, developed further and brought to a five-step model: (1) pre-reflective experience of discomfort, (2) lived, bodily discomfort, (3) suffered illness, (4) disease pondering, and (5) disease state. To fall ill is to fall victim to a gradual process of alienation, and with each step this alienating process is taken to a new qualitative level. Consequently, the five steps of falling ill have not only a contingent chronological order but also a kind of logical order, in that they typically presuppose each other. I adopt Sartre’s focus on embodiment as the core ground of the alienation process, but point out that the alienation of the body in illness is not only the experience of a psychic object, but an experience of the independent life of one’s own body. This facticity of the body is the result neither of the gaze of the other person, nor of a reflection adopting the outer perspective of the other in an indirect way, but is a result of the very otherness of one’s own body, which addresses and plagues us when we fall ill. I use examples of falling ill and being a patient to show how a phenomenology of falling ill can be helpful in educating health-care personnel (and perhaps also patients) about the ways of the lived body.
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| 31804. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik, 1966-
(författare)
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The Phenomenology of Frailty : Existentialism and Old-Age Vulnerability
- 2024
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Ingår i: The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism. - : Routledge. - 9781032162584 - 9781032162638 - 9781003247791 ; , s. 405-415
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- To become old means to become frail. The human body ages in ways that depend on genes, environmental-, and chance-factors, but if we do not end our lives as a result of a deadly accident or sudden onset of a lethal disease, we will all face a final phase of frailty before we die. Frailty may be caused by way of disease processes, but it can also consist in an increased sense of fragility, weakness, fatigue, and dizziness without a detected disease, which makes a person more likely to fall ill and make it harder to recover from illness. Neither phenomenologists nor existentialists have spent much time analysing frailty, except, perhaps, in the latter case, as a feature of human life to be avoided and resisted by way of a strong will and brave choices. The primary example would be Jean-Paul Sartre, but also Simone de Beauvoir is guilty of a certain contempt for bodily fragility. Arguably, the theories of some phenomenologists, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, do a good job of rehabilitating human vulnerability in general, but not in the sense of a specific frailty related to illness and ageing. Despite this lack of a phenomenology of frailty in phenomenological-existentialist philosophy there are resources in this tradition to be exploited in developing such a subject. A phenomenology of frailty could be of importance not only for philosophers and empirical researchers, but also for old people and their care takers in attempts to make frail lives more bearable. The chapter develops a phenomenology of frailty by making use of concepts and arguments developed by existentialist thinkers, but also by scrutinizing them further and turning them against their fathers and mothers.
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| 31805. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The Phenomenology of Health and Illness
- 2001
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Ingår i: Handbook of phenomenology and medicine. - Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic. - 1402001517 - 9781402001512 ; , s. 87-108
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Features essays that demonstrate that because phenomenology provides extraordinary insights into many of the issues that are directly addressed within the world of medicine. This title is suitable for those who are interested in the philosophy of medicine, but for all healthcare professionals who are actively engaged in the care of the sick.
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| 31806. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik, 1966-
(författare)
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The Phenomenology of Objectification in and Through Medical Practice and Technology Development
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. - : Oxford University Press. - 0360-5310 .- 1744-5019. ; 48:2, s. 141-150
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectification is a real problem in medicine that can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine: the patient's body should be viewed as a biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. Listening to the patient's illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far mainly been identifying the back sides of objectification in medicine, in this paper the aim is to analyze differences between detrimental objectifications and objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity but, rather, at least in some cases, may lead the patient to feel more at home with his body.
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| 31807. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The phenomenology of suffering in medicine and bioethics
- 2014
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Ingår i: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1386-7415 .- 1573-0980 .- 1573-1200. ; 35:6, s. 407-420
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things-bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values-and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about (1) my embodiment, (2) my engagements in the world together with others, and (3) my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling (a mood), but as such, it has implications for and involves the person's entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood-as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments-but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person's identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances.
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| 31808. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The relationship between empathy and sympathy in good health care
- 2015
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Ingår i: Medicine, Health care and Philosophy. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1386-7423 .- 1572-8633. ; 18:2, s. 267-277
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whereas empathy is most often looked upon as a virtue and essential skill in contemporary health care, the relationship to sympathy is more complicated. Empathic approaches that lead to emotional arousal on the part of the health care professional and strong feelings for the individual patient run the risk of becoming unprofessional in nature and having the effect of so-called compassion fatigue or burnout. In this paper I want to show that approaches to empathy in health care that attempt to solve these problems by cutting empathy loose from sympathy-from empathic concern-are mistaken. Instead, I argue, a certain kind of sympathy, which I call professional concern, is a necessary ingredient in good health care. Feeling oneself into the experiences and situation of the patient cannot be pursued without caring for the patient in question if the empathy is going to be successful. Sympathy is not only a thing that empathy makes possible and more or less spontaneously provides a way for but is something that we find at work in connection to empathy itself. In the paper I try to show how empathy is a particular form of emotion in which I feel with, about, and for the other person in developing an interpretation of his predicament. The with and for aspects of the empathy process are typically infused by a sympathy for the person one is empathizing with. Sympathy can be modulated into other ways of feeling with and for the person in the empathy process, but these sympathy-replacement feelings nevertheless always display some form of motivating concern for the target. Such an understanding of empathy is of particular importance for health care and other professions dealing with suffering clients.
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| 31809. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The relevance of Heidegger's philosophy of technology for biomedical ethics
- 2013
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Ingår i: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1386-7415 .- 1573-0980 .- 1573-1200. ; 34:1, s. 1-15
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Heidegger's thoughts on modern technology have received much attention in many disciplines and fields, but, with a few exceptions, the influence has been sparse in biomedical ethics. The reason for this might be that Heidegger's position has been misinterpreted as being generally hostile towards modern science and technology, and the fact that Heidegger himself never subjected medical technologies to scrutiny but was concerned rather with industrial technology and information technology. In this paper, Heidegger's philosophy of modern technology is introduced and then brought to bear on medical technology. Its main relevance for biomedical ethics is found to be that the field needs to focus upon epistemological and ontological questions in the philosophy of medicine related to the structure and goal of medical practice. Heidegger's philosophy can help us to see how the scientific attitude in medicine must always be balanced by and integrated into a phenomenological way of understanding the life-world concerns of patients. The difference between the scientific and the phenomenological method in medicine is articulated by Heidegger as two different ways of studying the human body: as biological organism and as lived body. Medicine needs to acknowledge the priority of the lived body in addressing health as a way of being-in-the-world and not as the absence of disease only. A critical development of Heidegger's position can provide us with a criterion for distinguishing the uses of medical technologies that are compatible with such an endeavor from the technological projects that are not.
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| 31810. |
- Svenaeus, Fredrik
(författare)
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The Truthfulness of Psychoanalysis
- 2000
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Ingår i: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. - 1386-7415 .- 1573-0980. ; 21:4, s. 355-360
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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